Arizona Cardinals’ QB John Skelton evaluates team and self during bye

The Arizona Cardinals head to Atlanta to face the Falcons on Sunday. Atlanta will be hungry for a win after suffering their first and only loss of the season last weekend, but the Cardinals should be ravenous, considering they’ve lost five straight.

Coming off the bye, Arizona has had a full week to look back and evaluate their play up to this point and that includes the performance of quarterback John Skelton.

“Yeah I looked back at some of the film from the past few games,” Skelton said. “You know I think across the board we’ve got to play better, obviously our record speaks to that.”

Skelton returned to the role of starting quarterback after Kevin Kolb went down with a rib injury October 14. Since that time he’s been trying to find his rhythm and some consistency in his play. On November 4 against Green Bay, he may have had his best effort yet despite suffering another loss.

“There’s always room for improvement whether you’re winning or losing and we’ve been losing so there’s more room for improvement than that,” Skelton said.

Speaking of losing, what happened to the team that rattled off four straight wins to start the season?

“We probably play best when we’re underdogs and no one really expects anything out of us,” Skelton said. “People called the 4-0 start a fluke and rightfully so because we lost the last five. All we can do is worry about ourselves, go out there and play the game no matter who the opponent is.”

Skelton also said that despite this rough stretch, he feels they have the guys in this locker room to get back on track.

“We’ve always had the confidence in ourselves,” Skelton said. “We know we have the players; we have the right guys to get the job done. But when push comes to shove, we haven’t been getting it done.”

After watching film of the first nine weeks, Skelton said ball security is going to be key for this team going forward.

“Dropped balls on third down, bad balls on third down, turnovers,” Skelton said. “All these factors add up to losses. We have the ability, we’ve seen it in practice and we’ve seen it in weeks past, we just gotta translate it to Sundays now.”

The Cardinals hope that positive play from practice pays dividends Sunday against the Falcons in Atlanta. Kick off is slated for 11 a.m. local time. You can catch that game on Arizona Sports 620 and 92.3 KTAR.